House Resolution 284: Stealth Attack On Egypt

Two resolutions have been introduced in the House this session dealing with Egyptian elections – H. Con. Res. 279 (introduced Oct. 26th) and H. Con Res. 284 (introduced Oct. 27th). Both include language supportive of progress toward real democracy in that country, and critical of deficiencies in efforts thus far. The general thrust of both resolutions is that positive steps toward democracy should be recognized but more needs to be done.

On November 16th the House International Relations Committee approved H. Con. Res. 284 by unanimous consent, as part of part of a group of resolutions approved en bloc.

Now, with no warning or public debate, H. Con. Res. 284 has been substantially re-written and reportedly will be taken to the House floor under suspension of the rules in the coming days. The new version of the resolution - which will not be available publicly until it is introduced on the House floor - is essentially a condemnation of the recent elections and of the Government of Egypt.

In addition, it includes language - similar to language introduced in recent years in other bills and resolutions - that challenges (and implicitly threatens) the existing U.S.-Egypt relationship. It urges the President to take into account Egypt's progress toward dealing with the many criticisms enumerated in the resolution when determining "the type and nature of United States diplomatic engagement with the Government of Egypt" and "the type and level of assistance to be requested [by the Administration in its annual budget submission to Congress] for the Government of Egypt."

The new version of the resolution raises important concerns about and proposes harsh consequences to one of America's most important allies. It would seem that such a measure would merit serious scrutiny and debate. Instead, it appears that the resolution is set to move forward as a stealth measure, pushed through in the final hours of the 109th Congress. The resolution does not yet appear on the suspension calendar, so there is no public awareness that it is coming up. Moreover, even when it does appear, it will appear with the original resolution number and title (and the new text will not be available until it is introduced on the floor). This will leave most Members under the impression that they will be voting on the version passed by the Committee, rather than on potentially controversial language that has been subject to no public scrutiny or debate.

Text of original resolution follows:

HCON 284 IH

109th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. CON. RES. 284
Expressing the sense of Congress with respect to the 2005 presidential and parliamentary elections in Egypt.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

October 27, 2005
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN (for herself and Mr. ACKERMAN) submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was referred to the Committee on International Relations

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

Expressing the sense of Congress with respect to the 2005 presidential and parliamentary elections in Egypt.

Whereas promoting freedom and democracy is a foreign policy and national security priority of the United States;

Whereas free, fair, and transparent elections constitute a foundation of any meaningful democracy;

Whereas in his 2005 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush stated that `the great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East';

Whereas in her June 20, 2005, remarks at the American University in Cairo, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated: `[T]he Egyptian Government must fulfill the promise it has made to its people--and to the entire world--by giving its citizens the freedom to choose. Egypt's elections, including the Parliamentary elections, must meet objective standards that define every free election.';

Whereas on February 26, 2005, Egyptian President Mubarak proposed to amend the Egyptian Constitution to allow for Egypt's first ever multi-candidate presidential election;

Whereas in May 2005, President Bush stated that Egypt's presidential election should proceed with international monitors and with rules that allow for a real campaign;

Whereas Egypt prohibited international monitoring in the presidential election, calling such action an infringement on its national sovereignty;

Whereas domestic monitoring of the election became a major point of contention between the government, the judiciary, and civil society organizations;

Whereas in May 2005, the Judges Club, an unofficial union for judges, took the provisional decision to boycott the elections if their demand for a truly independent judiciary was not met;

Whereas the Judges Club initially insisted that the 13,000 judges were in no position to monitor the election if plans proceeded for polling at 54,000 stations on one day.

Whereas the government responded to their demands by grouping polling stations to decrease their number to about 10,000, more or less matching the number of available judges;

Whereas on September 2, 2005, a majority of the general assembly of the Judges Club decided that the judges would supervise the election and report any irregularities;

Whereas several coalitions of Egyptian civil society organizations demanded access to polling stations on election day and successfully secured court rulings granting them such access;

Whereas the Presidential Election Council, citing its constitutional authority to oversee the elections process, reportedly ignored the court order for several days, before they granted some nongovernmental organizations access to polling stations a few hours before the polls opened;

Whereas the presidential campaign ran from August 17 to September 4, 2005;

Whereas the presidential election held on September 7, 2005, was largely peaceful, but reportedly marred by low turnout, general confusion over election procedures, alleged manipulation by government authorities, and other inconsistencies;

Whereas the denial of full access by the Government of Egypt to domestic and international monitors undermines the legitimacy of Egypt's presidential and parliamentary elections;

Whereas parliamentary elections will be held in Egypt in three stages: on November 9, 2005, in eight provinces, including Cairo and its twin city of Giza, on November 20 in nine provinces, and on December 1 in nine other provinces;

Whereas it is in the national interests of the United States and Egypt that a truly representative, pluralist, and legitimate Egyptian parliament be elected; and

Whereas the Government of Egypt now has the opportunity to take necessary measures to ensure that the coming legislative elections are free, fair, and transparent: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress--

(1) recognizes the importance of the presidential election held on September 7, 2005, as a first step toward greater openness and political reforms in Egypt;

(2) expresses concern over the lack of international election monitoring and irregularities during the Egyptian presidential election;

(3) recognizes that the development of a democratically-elected representative and empowered Egyptian national parliament is the fundamental reform needed to permit real progress towards the rule of law and democracy;

(4) calls on the Government of Egypt, during the 2005 parliamentary elections, to--

(A) authorize the judiciary to supervise the election process across the country and at all levels;

(B) authorize the presence of accredited representatives of all competing parties and independent candidates at polling stations and during the vote-counting; and

(C) allow local and international election monitors full access and accreditation;

(5) calls on the Government of Egypt to separate the apparatus of the National Democratic Party from the operations of government, to divest all government holdings in Egyptian media, and to end the government monopoly over printing and distribution of newspapers; and

(6) calls on the Government of Egypt to repeal the 1981 emergency law and in the development of any future anti-terrorism legislation to allow peaceful, constitutional political activities, including public meetings and demonstrations, and allow full parliamentary scrutiny of any such legislation.

House recommends national Jewish history month

By Larry Lipman
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 16, 2005

WASHINGTON — Next month will be the first annual American Jewish History Month if President Bush accepts a resolution the U.S. House passed late Thursday.

The measure passed unanimously with a 423-0 vote.

The non-binding resolution sponsored by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Pembroke Pines, urges Bush to designate by executive order the month of January each year as American Jewish History month, similar to the way February has been designated Black History Month.

More than 250 members of the House joined in co-sponsoring the resolution, led by Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House International Relations Committee. Local Reps. Mark Foley, R-Jupiter, Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, E. Clay Shaw Jr., R-Fort Lauderdale, and Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, were among the co-sponsors.

Wasserman Schultz introduced the resolution late Wednesday after receiving a commitment from House Speaker Dennis Hastert that he would contact Bush and urge him to issue the order.

Congress last year adopted a resolution recognizing this year as the 350th anniversary of American Jewish life and suggested that a month recognizing the contribution of Jews to America be established.

"American Jewish History Month would honor the contributions of American Jews to society," Wasserman Schultz said in introducing the resolution. "Similar to Black History Month in February and Women's History Month in March, American Jewish History Month would present educators with the opportunity and tools to teach diversity and cultural awareness."

Wasserman Schultz noted that "ignorance about Jews and our history, culture and contributions to American society remains widespread in the United States. This ignorance leads to hatred and bigotry, and one way to stop it is through education. As we all know, education leads to understanding."

Bush least popular US president: survey

Australian Associated Press
December 17, 2005

President George W Bush ranks as the least popular and most bellicose of the last 10 US presidents, according to a new survey.

Only nine per cent of the 662 people polled picked Bush as their favourite among the last 10 presidents.

John F Kennedy topped that part of the survey with 26 per cent, closely followed by Bill Clinton (25 per cent) and Ronald Reagan (23 per cent).

Bush was also viewed as the most warlike president (43 per cent), the worst for the economy (42 per cent) and the least effective (33 per cent). But he was rated most highly in response to a question on who would do the right thing even if it were unpopular.

The survey was conducted by the Chicago-based National Qualitative Centres, a marketing research company, as part of research for a forthcoming book on popular preferences, one of its authors, Ken Berwitz, said.

Israel-Egypt trade grows

Egypt’s trade with Israel is expected to more than double this year.

An agreement that allows Egyptian goods made with at least 11.7 percent Israeli products to enter the United States free of customs duty is behind the 130 percent increase in Egyptian-Israeli trade, from $58 million in 2004 to a projected $134 million in 2005, according to figures from the Israeli Export Institute.

The United States brokered the Qualified Industrial Zone agreement this year to induce Egypt to take a more prominent role in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process once Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last summer.

Poll: Majority Oppose Immediate Iraq Exit

By WILL LESTER
Associated Press Writer
December 17, 2005

A solid majority of Americans oppose immediately pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, citing as a main reason the desire to finish the job of stabilizing the country, an AP-Ipsos poll found.

Some 57 percent of those surveyed said the U.S. military should stay until Iraq is stabilized, while 36 percent favor an immediate troop withdrawal. A year ago, 71 percent of respondents favored keeping troops in Iraq until it was stabilized.

In an effort to build public support for his Iraq policy, President Bush planned an Oval Office address for Sunday night to discuss the U.S. mission and what lies ahead in 2006.

The speech will be his first from the Oval Office since March 2003 when he announced the invasion of Iraq. In the past two weeks, the president has given four speeches on Iraq.

In the poll, when people were asked in an open-ended question the main reason the U.S. should keep troops in Iraq, 32 percent said to stabilize the country and 26 percent said to finish the rebuilding job under way.

Only one in 10 said they wanted to stay in Iraq to fight terrorism; just 3 percent said to protect U.S. national security.

"You've got to finish the job," said Terry Waterman, a store manager from Superior, Wis. "The whole world is looking to us for leadership. We can't have another Vietnam."

Other recent polling has found that when given additional options, many people favor a step somewhere in between having troops leave immediately and staying until the country is stabilized.

After months of unrelenting violence, millions of Iraqis turned out this past week to choose a parliament. Early estimates placed the voter turnout close to 70 percent of 15 million Iraqis voting.

Some 49 percent of Americans now say the war with Iraq was a mistake, according to the poll of 1,006 adults conducted Tuesday through Thursday. That compares with 53 percent in August. Two years ago, only 34 percent of those surveyed said the war was a mistake.

Two years ago, after ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was captured, 64 percent of respondents said the war was the right thing to do. Now, 42 percent say it was the right decision.

Over the past two years, some of the biggest shifts on whether the war was a good decision or a mistake have come among married people with children, those with low incomes and those with a high school education or less.

"Whether the war is a mistake is less relevant than what we should do now," said John McAdams, a political scientist at Marquette University in Milwaukee. "A fair number of people may think it's a mistake, but still don't want to lose."

Lawmakers Back Use Of Evidence Coerced From Detainees

By Eric Schmitt and Tim Golden
New York Times
December 17, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - House and Senate negotiators agreed Friday to a measure that would enable the government to keep prisoners at Guantánamo Bay indefinitely on the basis of evidence obtained by coercive interrogations.

The provision, which has been a subject of extensive bargaining with the Bush administration, could allow evidence that would not be permitted in civilian courts to be admissable in deciding whether to hold detainees at the American military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In recent days, the Congressional negotiators quietly eliminated an explicit ban on the use of such material in an earlier version of the legislation.

The measure is contained in the same military policy bill that includes Senator John McCain's provision to ban the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in American custody worldwide. Mr. Bush reluctantly embraced Mr. McCain's ban on Thursday. The full House is expected to approve the compromise bill soon, with the Senate to follow in the next few days, Congressional officials said.

The juxtaposition of the seemingly contradictory measures immediately led lawyers for Guantánamo prisoners to assert that Congressional Republicans were helping to preserve the utility of coercive interrogations that senior White House officials have argued are vital to the fight against war against terror.

While the measure would allow the Guantánamo prisoners to challenge in federal court their status as enemy combatants and to appeal automatically any convictions and sentences handed down by military tribunals in excess of 10 years, it would still prevent the detainees from asking civilian courts to intervene with the administration over harsh treatment or prison conditions.

Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer who represents a group of Kuwaiti detainees at Guantánamo Bay, said in an interview that the new language would render the McCain restrictions unenforceable at the Cuban prison. "If McCain is one small step forward, enactment of this language would be two giant steps backwards," Mr. Wilner said.

Two of the main Senate sponsors of the measure, Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, defended the changes made to the language that the Senate passed last month, 84 to 14.

Mr. Graham acknowledged the measure's intention to make it possible to use information obtained by coercive interrogation techniques in military panels that evaluate whether detainees at Guantánamo are being rightfully held as "enemy combatants." He argued that the techniques were not abusive.

He also said that under his measure, the panels would weigh the value of the intelligence gained from an interrogation against a judgment on whether the statement was coerced. He said in a telephone interview with reporters that the amendment would promote "a balanced approach." A similar rule now applies in the military commissions that have been established to prosecute terror suspects at Guantánamo.

Human rights advocates criticized Mr. Levin, the chief Senate Democratic negotiator, for agreeing to restrict further the legal rights of Guantánamo detainees. Mr. Levin suggested that he had settled for the less damaging of two bad outcomes, saying he had deflected more onerous provisions that House Republicans wanted, including a demand that interrogators who abused prisoners be granted immunity from prosecution. Mr. Levin added in a telephone interview, "I don't think courts will allow coerced evidence in any proceeding."

The Bush administration has repeatedly considered - and rejected - explicitly prohibiting the use of evidence obtained by torture in the military commissions. Most recently, the issue was a major part of a lengthy internal debate over new rules for the tribunals that were promulgated on Aug. 31 in response to longstanding criticism in the United States and overseas that the tribunals are unfair.

Several officials familiar with the internal discussions said State Department officials and some senior Defense Department aides had strongly advocated an explicit ban on the use of evidence obtained by torture in a series of interagency discussions that began last December.

At one point in that process, the Pentagon official in charge of the tribunals, Maj. Gen. John D. Altenburg Jr., who is now retired, proposed barring any "confession or admission that was procured from the accused by torture," according to parts of a draft document read to a reporter. The rule defined torture as any act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain and suffering."

The ban was also championed by the counselor of the State Department, Philip D. Zelikow, two officials said. The deputy defense secretary, Gordon R. England, also supported the ban in meetings on the revised commission rules, as did some senior military officers, said a spokesman for Mr. England, Capt. Kevin Wensing.

But such a prohibition was opposed by other officials involved in the debate, including David S. Addington, who was then Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel and is now his chief of staff. A spokesman for the vice president said Mr. Addington would have no comment on his reported role in the policy debates.

Since the drafting of the presidential order that established the commissions on Nov. 13, 2001, White House officials have sought to give the commissions wide latitude to consider evidence that would be inadmissible in civilian courts.

Mr. Addington, who was a primary architect of the presidential order, argued in the debates earlier this year that by explicitly prohibiting evidence obtained by torture, the administration would raise an unnecessary red flag. suggesting at least implicitly that prisoners in American custody were, in fact, being tortured, officials said.

Justice Department officials involved in the debates contended that such a prohibition was not necessary because the matter was already covered by the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a treaty adopted by the United Nations more than two decades ago and ratified by the United States in 1994.

Big Changes Loom For Captives' Rights

House and Senate negotiators agreed on a new legal system for Guantánamo that will block courts from hearing complaints from detainees, including those of torture.
By Frank Davies
Miami Herald
December 17, 2005

WASHINGTON - Congress this weekend is expected to overhaul the legal system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, eliminating almost all access by detainees to federal courts and, according to its Senate sponsor, wiping out petitions filed by about 300 of the 500-plus captives in the prison camp.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., prime author of the new system, emphasized Friday that it will give each detainee one chance to contest his status with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, and for the first time get Congress involved in the oversight of Guantánamo.

''They will still have rights, but I don't think anybody intended in wartime that people who are trying to kill us have the right to sue us,'' Graham said.

But human rights groups and lawyers for detainees criticized the changes, which are part of a defense policy bill. House and Senate negotiators agreed on all provisions of the bill Friday, including Sen. John McCain's ban on ''cruel, inhuman and degrading'' treatment of detainees, clearing the way for a final vote.

Confusion

Key elements of the new system are causing confusion or are in dispute, including whether dozens of habeas corpus petitions filed so far will be wiped away. That would include a challenge to a military trial at Guantánamo now before the Supreme Court.

Graham said he believes all lawsuits filed so far -- some almost 4 years old -- ''will be dismissed'' when the new law goes into effect and is replaced by the one-shot appellate review.

But Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a sponsor of Graham's amendment, had the opposite interpretation.

''The revised amendment that we were able to work out with Sen. Graham does not apply to or alter any habeas case pending in the courts at the time of enactment,'' Levin said in a statement late Friday.

Tom Wilner, an attorney who represents six Kuwaitis held in Guantánamo, said he is prepared to argue to the judges handling his cases that the new law would not be retroactive.

Rights groups have focused their criticism on two provisions quietly added to the defense bill in the last few days.

Instead of barring the use of information ''obtained by undue coercion,'' the military tribunals that review each detainee's case are directed to assess whether such information has ``value.''

''That would just undermine the McCain amendment,'' said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. ``For the first time, Congress would be telling the courts it's OK to use information gained through torture.''

Different view

Graham's interpretation was very different. He said the new language means the appellate court will look closely at the tribunal hearings and whether they improperly relied on information from torture.

''The court will be looking over the shoulder of the tribunals and their standard of evidence,'' Graham said.

The other new provision bars not just habeas corpus petitions from detainees but any legal action, such as a lawsuit alleging torture, by a detainee who the courts agree was properly held as an enemy combatant.

''If they're held properly, they can't sue,'' said Graham. He added that could accelerate the release of some Guantánamo detainees ''who may not belong there,'' but whose release has been held up because of fears they would sue U.S. personnel.

Graham said that provision is designed to bar lawsuits over treatment at Guantánamo, where several detainees have alleged abuse, but not elsewhere. A detainee who claims he was mistreated in Afghanistan, Iraq or a country like Egypt, if he was shipped there by U.S. authorities, would still have grounds to sue, Graham said.

Wilner said the impact of the new law ''would be to make Guantánamo a no-law zone'' and insulate U.S. authorities from any legal challenge over mistreatment of prisoners. He predicted judges will be skeptical of its ''extreme efforts'' to strip the courts of jurisdiction.

Reports required

The new law also requires the Defense Department to give Congress periodic reports on detention procedures and makes the top civilian official overseeing detention issues -- currently Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England -- accountable to the Senate.

The law marks the first time that Congress is getting directly involved in the four-year battle over the legal system at Guantánamo. The open-ended detention of more than 500 prisoners has caused an international uproar and led to a Supreme Court ruling last year that the detainees had access to federal courts.

Suicidal Guantanamo Inmate Moved Out Of Isolation

Bahraini Detainee Who Complained of 'Intolerable' Conditions Is Shifted Before Court Hearing
By Josh White
Washington Post
December 17, 2005

Military officials at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have moved a suicidal detainee out of his isolation cell after he said he was trying to kill himself because of the "intolerable" conditions of his incarceration.

Jumah Dossari, 32, a Bahraini detainee who attempted to kill himself during a visit from his attorney in October, was moved from a segregation cell at the prison's Camp Five to a steel-mesh cell in Camp One, where he can interact with other detainees, government lawyers said. They informed Dossari's attorneys of the move on Thursday afternoon, a day before a hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington that was scheduled to address Dossari's case.

Dossari's attorneys have been asking the court to order Guantanamo Bay officials to improve his living conditions, which they argue have led him to attempt suicide at least nine times. In a letter to the lawyers Thursday, Edward H. White, a Justice Department lawyer, described what appeared to be a 10th suicide attempt Monday, when Dossari tried to open an existing gash on his right arm.

Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, one of Dossari's attorneys, said in court yesterday that his client is in imminent danger because of the extreme stress caused by captivity in a tiny isolation cell.

"The purpose of Guantanamo is to create a sense of hopelessness in detainees," Colangelo-Bryan said. "That appears to have worked on Mr. al-Dossari."

In declassified notes from a meeting with the lawyer last month, Dossari said that he "wanted to kill himself so that he could send a message to the world that the conditions at Guantanamo are intolerable" and said he tried to do it in a public way "so that the military could not cover it up and his death would not be anonymous."

Dossari slashed his arm and tried to hang himself during a bathroom break while he was meeting with Colangelo-Bryan, who found him. The suicide attempt left him with a fractured spine and 14 stitches in his arm.

Dossari reported that he felt on the "brink of collapse" and "destroyed" and said all he wanted was to interact with other detainees.

White said Dossari has been diagnosed with four different psychological disorders, including depression, and has been receiving regular treatment from a psychiatrist and a psychologist. He said it is unclear whether Dossari arrived at Guantanamo Bay with the psychological problems.

"Despite the fact that petitioner has repeatedly attempted suicide, he is getting extensive medical treatment," White said, adding that the move to Camp One allows Dossari adequate human interaction. "If anything they're being very diligent about monitoring the petitioner and treating him."

Camp One is a group of cell blocks that hold approximately 150 -- about 30 percent -- of the detainees at Guantanamo. Detainees live in their own cells, which are constructed of steel mesh, and can see and speak to others on the block. They also share an exercise yard.

By moving Dossari out of Camp Five -- the equivalent of a U.S. maximum-security prison -- the government effectively sought to remedy the problem before a federal judge stepped in. Judge Reggie B. Walton is still considering an order that would force the prison to put fewer restrictions on Dossari.

But Walton said yesterday that if judges begin issuing such orders, "we become the warden."

Human rights groups and lawyers are watching a proposal under discussion on Capitol Hill that would strip detainees of the ability to file habeas corpus claims and other cases with U.S. federal courts.

The proposed legislation, sponsored by Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), would instead direct a federal appeals court in Washington to review the decisions of Guantanamo Bay military panels that determine whether a detainee is "an enemy combatant." The measure would, however, allow those panels to use evidence against enemy combatants that was obtained by coercion.

Detainees also could appeal the verdicts of Guantanamo Bay military trials in the same court. No detainee has yet been tried before those "military commissions," whose authority is being challenged in a case that has gone to the Supreme Court.

"We're not going to turn the war on terror over to the judges," Graham said in a conference call with reporters yesterday. He has advocated, instead, for congressional oversight.

The legislation would effectively dismiss pending federal habeas cases on behalf of more than 300 Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Refiguring The Iraq Body Count

By Andrew Cockburn
Los Angeles Times
December 17, 2005

ALMOST AS soon as President Bush gave the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation as "30,000, more or less," aides hastened to downplay the number as "unofficial," plucked by Bush from "public estimates."

The president may have been quoting figures published by iraqbodycount.org, which has tabulated a death toll as high as 30,892 purely on the basis of published press reports of combatrelated killings. As IBC readily concedes, the estimate must be incomplete because it omits unreported deaths.

There is, however, another and more reliable method for estimating figures such as these: nationwide random sampling. No one doubts that the result accurately reflects the overall situation if the sample is truly random and the consequent data correctly calculated. That, after all, is how market researchers assess public opinion on everything from politicians to breakfast cereals.

In 2000, a team led by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health used random sampling to calculate the death toll in the Congolese civil war at 1.7 million. This figure prompted immediate action by the U.N. Security Council. No one questioned the methodology.

In September 2004, Roberts led a similar team that researched death rates in Iraq before and after the 2003 invasion. Making "conservative assumptions," the team concluded that "about 100,000 excess deaths" among men, women and children had occurred in 18 months. Most were directly attributable to the breakdown of the healthcare system prompted by the invasion. Violent deaths had soared twentyfold.

Unlike the respectful applause granted the Congolese study, this one, published in the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet, generated a firestorm of criticism. The outrage may have been prompted by the unsettling possibility that Iraq's liberation had already caused a third as many Iraqi deaths as the reported 300,000 murdered by Saddam Hussein in his decades of tyranny. So shocking was this concept that liberals joined hawks in denouncing the study.

Some of the attacks were selfevidently absurd. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman, for example, questioned the survey because it "appeared to be based on an extrapolation technique rather than a detailed body count," as if Blair had never made a political decision based on a poll.

Some questioned whether the sample was distorted by unrepresentative hot spots such as Fallouja. In fact, the amazingly dedicated and courageous Iraqi doctors who actually gathered the data visited 33 "clusters" selected on an entirely random basis. In each of these clusters, the teams conducted interviews in 30 households, again selected on a rigorously random basis. As it happened, Fallouja was one of the clusters that came up in this process. Erring on the side of caution, they eliminated Fallouja from their sample. Strictly speaking, the team should have included the data from that embattled city in their final result — random is random after all — which would have given an overall post-invasion excess death figure of no less than 268,000.

Many critics made a meal of the study's passing mention of a 95% "confidence interval" for the overall death toll of between 8,000 and 194,000. This did not mean, as asserted by some who ought to have known better, that the true figure lay between those numbers, and that the 98,000 number was produced by splitting the difference. In fact, the 98,000 figure represents the best estimate drawn from the data. Had the published study (which was intensively peer reviewed) cited the 80% confidence interval also calculated by the team — a statistically respectable option — then the spread would have been between 44,000 and 152,000.

Such statistical arcana were obviously beyond the grasp of most commentators, while the lack of any reference to the Johns Hopkins results in reports of Bush's recent remarks surely indicates a persistent reluctance to confront what we have really done to Iraq.

Columbia professor Richard Garfield, one of the team members and study authors, told me this week that by now the number of "excess deaths" in Iraq "couldn't possibly be less than 150,000." But, he added, "there's no reason to be guessing. We ought to know better."

ANDREW COCKBURN is the coauthor of "Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein" (HarperPerennial, 2000).

DOD Kicks Off Program To Recruit, Train Critical Language Speakers

Inside The Pentagon
December 15, 2005

The Defense Department last week launched a program that would help native speakers of languages deemed critical to national security acquire English proficiency so they may “effectively” function in federal government or private-sector positions, project officials tell Inside the Pentagon.

Under the “English for Heritage Language Speakers” (EHLS) program, participants will partake in a six-month, 720-hour intensive course designed to raise English language skills, while familiarizing students with the federal government’s use of language, Kevin Gormley told ITP Dec. 12.

Gormley is a program officer with the National Defense University-based National Security Education Program, which is managing the new effort.

NSEP offers scholarships and grants to students and universities focused on languages and cultures less commonly taught but considered crucial to protecting the United States from today’s threats. The defense secretary sets NSEP policy in consultation with a 13-member National Security Education Board.

Although there is no cap on the amount of students who may be accepted at this stage, nearly 30 scholarships will be awarded to U.S. citizens who agree to make a “good faith effort” to find work with the federal government, a move that could include many DOD positions ranging from translators to interrogators to military liaison officers, a feasibility report on the pilot program states.

The program’s first session, which kicks off in March, will focus on bolstering the English language skills of native Arabic, Russian and Chinese speakers. All these language groups will be represented in the program at the University of Washington in Seattle, while only those who speak Arabic will be at Washington’s Georgetown University, Gormley said.

Funding for the project became available with money in the fiscal year 2005 Defense Appropriations Act, and officials expect it will receive $2 million a year, Gormley said. The funds are dispersed from the Intelligence Community Management Account.

In a way, EHLS is a departure for NSEP, which usually provides grants for native English speakers to learn foreign languages. The new program is one of DOD’s attempts to tap into an existing pool of language experts in the United States.

A heritage language is the first language a person learns or the predominate language spoken during someone’s childhood, said Deborah Kennedy, EHLS program manager at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), the organization contracted to administer the program.

Partnering universities are reaching out to community centers to attract heritage language speakers with fluency in their language and some knowledge of English, Gormley said. Many of the applicants may be “under employed” persons who have advanced degrees but because of their weakness in English may have not advanced professionally in the United States, he added.

The intensive course will use “authentic materials” like memos, reports, terminology, mannerisms and acronyms that articulate the culture and language of the federal government and especially the Defense Department, Gormley said.

As part of the program’s feasibility study, CAL surveyed 12 military organizations that indicated Arabic, Persian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Pashto, Urdu and Korean as the most critical languages for national security interests. The same respondents listed translation, interpretation, conversation, presentations and reading as the primary work-related purposes for non-native English speakers currently on staff and highlighted writing as the weakest skill.

Language activities at Defense Department organizations range from data interpretation, listening and reading news sources, reconnaissance work, and speaking to elicit information, according to the surveyed respondents.

Gormley and the feasibility report also noted the importance of acclimating students to military mannerisms such as joint military terms, acronyms and concepts, so they may become familiar with military culture.

“Each job skill has a different set of requirements,” the report notes. “Collection involves listening and speaking; analytical work mostly involves reading and understanding. Either way, the linguist must be able to write a report in English that effectively conveys the information.”

A goal of the program is to recruit and train more language specialists who can meet the government’s Interagency Language Roundtable scale, a one- to five-level metric used to measure language proficiency. Under EHLS, applicants must be at level three proficiency for their native language and at least at level two in English.

The increased proficiency level, Gormley says, is an attempt to employ speakers with a heightened grasp of both their native and non-native languages to discern and relay subtleties in communications, he added.

The program, which has “no slated sunset day,” may run into challenges while recruiting and attempting to hire graduates, the feasibility report states.

“Participants are likely to be immigrants who came to the United States as adults,” it states. “Many of them will have difficultly obtaining security clearances, which will limit their ability to fulfill the federal service requirement.”

Slimming the pool further is the requirement mandating all scholarship applicants to be U.S. citizens, which reduces the program’s ability to recruit current graduate students, the report states.

In addition, it acknowledges that many adults may not be able to participate full time for a six-month period or support themselves and their families while in the program.

Despite the obstacles, EHLS is consistent with DOD’s language transformation roadmap, and is a result of post-9/11 discussions on the need for Americans to have a higher level of understanding of different languages and cultures, Gormley said.

In February, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz approved the new “Defense Language Transformation Roadmap,” a 19-page plan to overhaul military policy, doctrine and organizations to improve the diversity of foreign languages spoken in the armed forces (ITP, March 10, p1).

U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq “reinforce the reality that the Department of Defense needs a significantly improved organic capability in emerging languages and dialects, and a greater competence and regional area skills in those languages and dialects, and a surge capability to rapidly expand its language capabilities on short notice,” the document states.

Pressure To Isolate Iran Gathers Steam

President's most recent anti-Semitic remarks came ahead of new talks with EU nations aimed at halting Tehran's nuclear activities.
By John Daniszewski, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
December 16, 2005

LONDON — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks this week calling the massacre of Jews during World War II a myth is increasing pressure to isolate his nation just days ahead of new talks on Iran's nuclear ambitions, governments and commentators said Thursday.

A British official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the comments by the president were particularly unhelpful as the West searches for signs of compromise from Iran in the showdown over its nuclear program.

In Brussels, on the eve of a European Union summit, a draft resolution was circulating among foreign ministers Thursday that tells Iran, "The window of opportunity will not remain open forever," Reuters reported.

Next week, talks are planned in Vienna between Iran and France, Germany and Britain, the so-called EU-3 countries, which have taken the lead in negotiations over the nuclear program.

Iran is developing a capability it says will be used for the peaceful purpose of generating electricity. Western officials fear the country is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.

Since Ahmadinejad's election in June, Iran has defied the international community by beginning preliminary efforts to process yellowcake uranium. So far it has not taken the next step of enriching the material, which could be used in either an energy or arms program. Iranian officials insist they have the right to carry out the work.

If a compromise again proves elusive at next week's meeting over demands that Iran abandon enrichment plans, an emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency could be called to refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council, the British official said. At the council, the international community could formally sanction Iran and isolate it diplomatically.

With negotiations at a near-impasse after more than a year and patience wearing thin in Europe and the United States, Ahmadinejad's latest comments denying the Holocaust and calling for the state of Israel to be moved out of the Middle East were met with disbelief and indignation.

"Now it's not paranoid to worry about a president with annihilationist dreams — it's smart," British commentator Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian.

The words "outrageous" and "unacceptable" appeared often in the French press.

"When the leader of a country of 66 million people, a regional power, who dreams of nuclear power, breaks international law, denies history and calls for the destruction of a country and deportation of its population, it is no longer possible to [have] dialogue and cooperate," wrote Patrick Sabatier in Liberation, a left-leaning French daily.

"What are Europeans, and France most of all, waiting for before they at least freeze their diplomatic relations with Tehran?" he asked.

Berlin's official statements toward Ahmadinejad were particularly harsh. Germany is sensitive to Holocaust-related issues, and denying that the mass murder of Jews occurred during World War II is a criminal offense there.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the government "condemns the repeated remarks by the Iranian president in the sharpest form. I cannot deny that this will worsen bilateral relations and also affect the negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program," he said.

However, several analysts said that reaching a successful conclusion to the nuclear talks was so important to EU members that they may choose not to focus on Ahmadinejad's remarks for now.

"You have to send the signal that this is intolerable and counterproductive to Iranian international relations," said Rosemary Hollis of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. But she added, "If you give up on diplomacy, you get into gesture politics, which won't solve anything."

Iran's confidence is on the rise, she said, in part because the nation sees that the United States is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some analysts pointed out that Ahmadinejad's power is limited and his views don't reflect the positions of the Iranian government as a whole.

Western officials have long been accustomed to a degree of fractiousness in Iran's government, where power is shared among the president, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the clerical and judicial Guardian Council.

Johannes Reissner, an analyst with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said the Iranian president's remarks would strain the atmosphere around the nuclear talks but probably not stop them, because Ahmadinejad is not a negotiator or key figure in Iran's foreign policy.

"It is a problem, but to what degree is difficult to judge," Reissner said.

"The awful situation facing the Europeans is that this kind of attack is unacceptable for Israel. But the question is that if you want to change the policies of another country such as Iran, you have to keep contact.

"In my view," he added, "Ahmadinejad's strategy is to use these kinds of remarks in order to marginalize his domestic opponents. He's attempting to block policies within his country from rivals within the conservative camp."

Jean-Pierre Perrin, writing in Liberation, suggested that Ahmadinejad was deliberately trying to undermine any diplomatic solution on the nuclear question.

"Beyond the anti-Semitic speech of the president, there is a real strategy of confrontation with the West," Perrin said.

"A few days before the negotiations start again between Iran and three European countries to guarantee that the Iranian nuclear program will not end up on the production of an atomic weapon, he assures that his country will never give in to Western pressure," Perrin wrote. That is "a method to undermine the diplomatic efforts to achieve an acceptable compromise between Iran and the EU."

Malaysian: U.S. Plotting 2 Invasions

By Associated Press
December 16, 2005

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia's former prime minister accused the United States on Thursday of scheming to invade Iran and Syria and said the Iranian president's statements against Israel are giving Washington the excuse.

On Monday, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called the Holocaust a "myth."

Opening a three-day global peace forum in Kuala Lumpur, Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's former longtime leader, charged that the U.S. Congress has "prepared legal authority for aggression against other countries" through laws allowing it to meddle into other nations' affairs.

The Iran Freedom and Support Act of 2005 carries a subtle threat of war and "sounds like blackmail," he said. He noted that when introduced in the House, the official title was "to hold the current regime in Iran accountable for its threatening behavior and to support a transition to democracy in Iran."

"Democracy, human rights, possession of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) are convenient excuses for war and killing," said Mahathir.

He said Ahmadinejad's call to wipe out Israel has provided "additional grounds for aggression" to Washington.

Egypt's Muslim Brothers brand Israel a 'cancer'

Agence France Presse
Thu Dec 15,2005

The leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest opposition force, called Israel a "cancer" in the Middle East and said its peace treaty with Egypt should be submitted to a referendum.

"I declared that we will not recognize Israel which is an alien entity in the region. And we expect the demise of this cancer soon," Mohammed Mehdi Akef told the state-owned English language Ahram Weekly in an interview published Thursday.

His comments came amid an international outcry over a tirade against Israel by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has said the Holocaust was a "myth" and called for the Jewish state to be relocated as far away as Alaska.

Egypt became the first Arab country to establish diplomatic relations with Israel when it signed a peace treaty in 1979.

But Islamists opposed to the treaty assassinated president Anwar Sadat in 1981 for signing the Camp David accord, and hostility towards the Jewish state remains strong among Egyptians.

Akef stopped short of demanding the peace treaty be scrapped but suggested it should be submitted to a popular vote.

"That is for the people to decide... If I had the power I would put it to the people," he said.

The banned but tolerated Brotherhood won 20 percent of the seats in the 454-strong parliament in month-long elections that wrapped up last week, making it the largest opposition bloc in the house.

Following the unprecedented electoral gains, the United States hinted it might open channels of communication with the Brotherhood, which continues to be anxious about US support for Israel.

"The Muslim Brothers do not recognise Israel... 70 million Egyptians, 300 million citizens in the Arab world and 1.5 billion Muslims across the world do not recognise Israel," Akef said in another interview with the London-based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat pubublished on Sunday.

Most Egyptians are opposed to the development of stronger ties with Israel, particularly because of its continued occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Professional unions have expelled members for visiting the Jewish state and the culture ministry maintains a ban on Israeli participation at international events it hosts such as the Cairo book fair and cinema festival.

Agriculture remains the only sector that has seen close cooperation between Egypt and Israel, with a regular exchange of visits by officials and experts.

Egypt withdrew its ambassor from Tel Aviv in 2000 in protest at Israel's handling of the Palestinian intifada or uprising and appointed a new envoy only a few months ago.

Founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood is the largest Islamic movement in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country.

The group was banned in 1954 after a failed a attempt on the life of then president Gamal Abdul Nasser, who brutally suppressed the Brotherhood.

The movement, which renounced violence in the 1970s, says it wants to establish a moderate Islamist state in Egypt and has in recent months tried to assuage concerns of the country's Coptic christian minority over its agenda.

Iran's Ahmadinejad stepped up his anti-Israeli rhetoric on Wednesday, triggering international outrage.

"They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets," declared the right-winger, who took office after a shock election win in June.

In October he said Israel must be "wiped off the map", and last week described it as a "tumour."

Muslim Conspiracy to Rule World Just Nonsense

by Haroon Siddiqui
The Toronto Star (Canada)
Thursday, December 15, 2005

We had Wahhabism. We had the madrassas. We had the houris of Heaven. Now we have the caliphate.

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld et al have been raising the spectre of a worldwide Islamic rule by a caliph, as envisaged by Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Zarqawi and other terrorists.

The chances of a caliphate coming are zero. But raising its spectre helps keep Americans scared. Never mind that, just as the reasons given for the Iraq war proved false, the explanations offered for terrorism have not met the test of time either.

When 15 of the 19 terrorists of 9/11 turned out to have been Saudis, Washington and its apologists blamed Wahhabism, the essentialist Islam practised in Saudi Arabia. The problem with that theory was that the Saudi ruling family, the guardians of Wahhabism, was and remains the staunchest ally of the U.S. and guarantor of its energy needs.

We were also told that terrorists were hatched primarily in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere in religious schools. But we know now that most of those who bombed Bali, Jakarta, Istanbul, Amman, etc. were not graduates of those schools. Nor were those responsible for the train bombings in Madrid and London. They were Muslims born or raised in Europe.

So were the two Britons who went to Israel in 2003 to be suicide bombers. So was the man who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004. So have been some of those turning up in Iraq to join the insurgency.

The third theory was that suicide bombers were inspired by Islam's promise of a Paradise full of virgins. That may have motivated the religiously inclined but not others, certainly not women bombers, who had no such sexual favours to look forward to in Heaven.

Now comes the caliphate — from the Arabic word, khil'afah, rule by a khaleefah, successor to the Prophet Muhammad, who died in 632 A.D.

A caliphate is an ideal Islamic polity governed by God's law. But a debate has raged for 1,400 years over whether it's a religious requirement or just a tool to regulate social order and public welfare. Is it local or worldwide? There's no consensus.

The first caliphate lasted until 661 A.D. Others followed, the last one being the Ottoman Empire that ended in 1924.

Since then, debate has turned to how best to combine religion and state. There's no agreement. States labelling themselves Islamic have offered varying models — Afghanistan of the Taliban, Iran of the mullahs, the semi-dictatorships of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the moderate Malaysia. Iraq now calls itself an Islamic democracy, á la Israel's Jewish democracy.

The dream of a caliphate is confined to the marginalized: a rallying cry by the bin Laden-Zarqawi crowd, and, among others, by a Central Asian group battling the dictatorships there.

Uzbek President Islam Karimov invokes the caliphate to justify his brutality. Who would have thought he would be echoed by Washington?

Gen. John Abizaid, U.S. commander in the Middle East, says Islamists "will try to re-establish a caliphate throughout the entire Muslim world." Rumsfeld magnifies the danger, saying "Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East and which would threaten legitimate governments in Europe, Africa and Asia."

George W. Bush talks about "a totalitarian Islamic empire that reaches from Indonesia to Spain."

Exaggerating the power of the enemy is a standard war tactic (used against Saddam Hussein by both George H.W. Bush in the 1991 Gulf War and by George W. Bush in 2003). But this caliphate business takes the cake. One can laugh it off but for its possible long-term consequences.

One of the biggest mistakes of the war on terrorism was the misreading of bin Laden's initial popularity among Muslims.

He always had two constituencies; the few who joined his terrorist campaigns and the many who identified only with his articulation of Muslim grievances, albeit in religious terms.

America analyzed his theology and ignored his political message, while Muslim masses tuned out his religious claptrap but identified with his political message. He has since lost even that lure but America remains hobbled by its fixation with his religious pronouncements.

In being so, the Bush administration makes him and other terrorists sound more important than they are, thereby playing into their hands.

They no doubt love their own caliphate talk getting such worldwide amplification from Washington.

Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus.

Putin Calls Russia Defender of Islamic World

MosNews
12.12.2005 18:05 MSK (GMT +3)

Russia is the most reliable partner of the Islamic world and most faithful defender of its interests, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in Chechnya’s capital Grozny. Putin unexpectedly visited the war-ravaged republic to speak in the local parliament that opened for its first sitting on Monday.

“Russia has always been the most faithful, reliable and consistent defender of the interests of the Islamic world. Russia has always been the best and most reliable partner and ally. By destroying Russia, these people (terrorists) destroy one of the main pillars of the Islamic world in the struggle for rights (of Islamic states) in the international arena, the struggle for their legitimate rights,” Putin was quoted by Itar —Tass as saying, drawing applause from Chechen parliamentarians.

“Those who are trying to defend these false (extremist) ideals, those who are used as cannon fodder, who plant a mine for ten dollars or shoot with automatic weapons either do not know or have forgotten this,” the president said.

“Those who organize such activity certainly do this deliberately, understanding what goals they want to achieve,” Putin went on to say.

The leaders of the main Islamic states understand this, he added.

“For this reason their representatives were present at the general voting in the referendum on the Constitution of the Chechen Republic, they were at the presidential elections; both the Organization of Islamic Conference and the League of Arab States, our colleagues and friends were present at the elections to the parliament.”

Putin said that “member countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference have unanimously passed a decision that Russia will begin working as an observer on a permanent basis”.

“And we shall continue our activity within the framework of this organization. Quite recently a delegation of Russia’s Muslims has been to Mecca to discuss the problems of Muslim world development with their brothers. I repeat: Russia will pursue this policy,” the president added.

President Vladimir Putin paid a surprise morale-boosting visit to Chechnya Monday, flown into the war-wracked province by helicopter under tight security. Putin declared the turbulent region was on the road to peace.

Russia, a country with a total population of approximately 144 million, has 23 million Muslim residents representing 38 peoples, according to the Council of Muftis of Russia.

Egypt says US ignores offer to train Iraqi troops

By Sue Pleming
Reuters
Thu Dec 15 2005

Egypt has repeatedly offered to train tens of thousands of Iraqi forces but Washington ignored this offer and chose instead to criticize Cairo for not doing enough, Egypt's envoy to the United States said.

The United States has consistently accused Arab countries, including Egypt, of not doing enough to stabilize and rebuild Iraq, but Egyptian Ambassador Nabil Fahmy said on Thursday this criticism was unfounded.

"We have offered to train Iraqis for over two years," he told reporters at a breakfast at his residence.

Fahmy said he offered Egypt's help in troop training during discussions with officials from the Pentagon, the State Department and members of Congress but they gave no response.

"It's got to the point that I have stopped begging," he said. "It's mind-boggling," he added.

Asked to comment on Fahmy's complaint, a State Department official said Iraqi troop training was a bilateral issue between Egypt and Iraq and not the United States.

He added that the training of Iraqi forces would most likely not be cost-efficient in Egypt.

The Pentagon did not have any immediate comment.

Fahmy said Egypt, which did not want to send its own forces into Iraq, had the capacity to train 3,000 Iraqi troops every three months at a school outside of Alexandria in Egypt.

So far, he said Egypt had trained 146 Iraqi forces.

"Iraqis don't want Arab forces in Iraq and we are offering to train Iraqi forces and no one is listening," he said.

Training Iraqi forces is one of the biggest challenges facing the United States and the ability of Iraqi security forces is key to when more than 150,000 U.S. troops can return home.

Iraqis went to the polls on Thursday and Fahmy said if the election went well this should be applauded but the real test would be what happened in Iraq three to five years from now.

"Democracy in Iraq is not about holding elections," he said. "The real challenge is how they look at their constitution and how they strengthen it to make it inclusive," he added.

He said Egypt fully supported the U.N. investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri last February 14.

"The killings in Lebanon have to stop, no ifs, no buts," he said.

However, Fahmy declined to comment on whether Syria was responsible for high-profile killings in Lebanon and said Egypt was awaiting to hear the final outcome of the investigation.

"No one can condone these deaths but we should not jump to conclusions until the (U.N.) report is finished," he said.

The Elephant in the Middle East Living Room

Watching Wahhabis.
By R. James Woolsey
National Review
December 14, 2005

Early in November, hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee examined hate literature being distributed in American mosques. This material had been translated and published earlier this year by Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom. (I was chairman of Freedom House at the time and wrote the book's foreword.) The hearings examined these Saudi publications in the context of assessing Chairman Arlen Specter's proposed Saudi Arabia Accountability Act. In addition to the material presented at the hearings, the underlying role of Saudi Arabia's state religion, generally referred to in the West as Wahhabism, deserves expanded attention for a variety of reasons.

Recently President Bush addressed a number of the ideological aspects of this long war in which we are now engaged. As he has put it now on two occasions, "Islamofascism" is one plausible characterization of our enemy. Although this is a major step forward beyond designating "terror" as the enemy (we're certainly at war with more than a tactic, albeit a terrible one) there was still a major element missing in his presentation. The elephant in the Middle East living room is Wahhabism. Over the long run, this movement is in many ways the most dangerous of the ideological enemies we face.

Within Sunni Islam, along with several more moderate schools, there are two varieties of theocratic totalitarianism. Both of these are Salafists, believing that only a literal version of the model of rule implemented in the seventh century in Islam has ultimate legitimacy. Both have the objective of rule by a unified mosque and state; for some this theocracy is personified by the caliph. Different individuals in these movements emphasize different aspects, but generally the common objective is to unify first the Arab world under theocratic rule, then the Muslim world, then those regions that were once Muslim (e.g. Spain), then the rest of the world.

Such totalitarian visions seem crazy to most of us; we thus tend to underestimate their potency. Yet the Salafists' theocratic totalitarian dream has some features in common with the secular totalitarian dreams of the twentieth century, e.g., the Nazis' Thousand Year Reich, or the Communists' World Communism. The latter two movements produced tens of millions of deaths in the 20th century in part because, at least in their early stages, they engendered "fire in the minds of men" in Germany, Russia, and China and were able to establish national bases. Salafists had such a national base for the better part of a decade in Afghanistan and have had one controlling the Arabian Peninsula for some eight decades. They haven't attained the Nazis' and Communists' death totals yet, but this is only due to lack of power, not to less murderous or less totalitarian objectives.

Salafists of both jihadist and loyalist stripe, e.g. both al Qaeda and the Wahhabis, share basic views on all points but one. Both exhibit fanatical hatred of Shiite Muslims, Sufi Muslims, Jews, Christians, and democracy, and both brutally suppress women. They differ only on whether it is appropriate to carry out jihadist attacks against any enemy near or far now — i.e. to murder Iraqi Shiite children getting candy, people working in the World Trade Center, etc. — or whether to subordinate such efforts for the time being to the political needs of a particular state, i.e. Saudi Arabia.

The relationship between the Salafist jihadists such as al Qaeda and Salafist loyalists such as the Wahhabis is thus loosely analogous to that between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists of the 1930's. Trotskyites, like al Qaeda, believed it was justified to use violence anywhere while Stalinists, like the Wahhabis, showed primary allegiance to protecting "socialism in one country", i.e. the U.S.S.R. The fact that this difference was only a question of tactics didn't prevent the Trotskyites and Stalinists from being the most bitter of enemies — Trotsky died in 1940 with a Stalinist axe in his skull.

The "IslamoNazi" Threat
Similarly, al Qaeda launches attacks in Saudi Arabia and the Saudis work with us to capture and kill al Qaeda members who threaten them. In this sense both Saudi government officials and probably even Wahhabi clerics are willing to "cooperate with the U.S. on counter-terrorism." But this cooperation does not negate the fact that al Qaeda and the Wahhabis share essentially the same underlying totalitarian theocratic ideology. It is this common Salafist ideology that the Wahhabis have been spreading widely — financed by $3-4 billion/year from the Saudi government and wealthy individuals in the Middle East over the last quarter century — to the madrassas of Pakistan, the textbooks of Turkish children in Germany, and the mosques of Europe and the U.S. Alex Alexiev, senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, testified before Congress on June 26, 2003, that this is approximately three-four times what the Soviets were spending on external propaganda and similar "active measures" at the peak of Moscow's power in the 1970s.

This underlying Salafist ideology being spread by the Wahhabis is fanatical and murderous, indeed explicitly genocidal. (The president's "Islamofascist" term is thus perhaps understated — the Italian fascists were horrible, but not genocidal. "IslamoNazi" would be more accurate.)

For example, the BBC reported on July 18 of this year that a publication given to foreign workers in Saudi Arabia by the Islamic cultural center, which falls under the authority of the ministry of Islamic affairs, advocates the killing of "refusers" (Shia). The imam of Al-Haram in Mecca, (Islam's most holy mosque), Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman al-Sudayyis, was barred from Canada last year after the translation of his sermons calling Jews "the scum of the earth" and "monkeys and pigs" who should be "annihilated." Materials distributed by the Saudi government to the Al-Farouq Masjid mosque in Brooklyn call for the killing of homosexuals and converts from Islam to another religion.

Ideas Have Consequences
The direct consequences of such murderous teachings extend to the war in Iraq. In November of 2004, 26 Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia published a call for jihad against the U.S. in Iraq. Because of the high religious status of the clerics within Saudi Arabia, the exhortation was widely interpreted as a fatwa, a religious ruling. Several Saudi suicide bombers and other terrorists captured in Iraq have indicated that it was this fatwa that had turned them to terrorism. Said one: "I hadn't thought of coming to Iraq, but I had fatwas . . . I read the communiqué of the 26 clerics ... ." During the battle for Fallujah in 2004 Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Muhsin Al-Abikan said to the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, "What is happening in Falluja is the result of such fatwas ... [The resistance] is bringing about tragedy and destruction for Iraq, Falluja, and their residents." Nasser Sulayman al-Amer, one of the 26 signers of the call for jihad, admitted recently at a press conference in Kuwait that he had met with Iraqis on this matter. On November 13 of this year the Iraqi national-security adviser, Mowaffak Rubaie said: "Most of those who blow themselves up in Iraq are Saudi nationals."

Lost in Translation
Following the controversy over the 26 clerics' edict the Saudi government retracted it, in a sense. But the only two Saudi officials who released the retraction publicly were two Saudi ambassadors, those to the U.S. and the U.K. And the retractions were issued only in English.

Overbalancing such "retractions" of Wahhabi statements is the fact that Saudi education is turning toward, not away from, Wahhabi influence. In February of 2005 a secularist reformer, Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid, headed the Saudi Education Ministry. As he was beginning to respond to internal criticism of curricula that incited hatred of non-Muslims and non-Wahhabi Muslims, he was replaced by Abdullah bin Saleh al-Obaid, a hard-core Wahhabi. Controlling 27 percent of the national budget, al-Obaid will have a substantial effect on the views of the next generation of Saudis. His views are illuminated by aspects of his background. From 1995 to 2002, al-Obaid headed the Muslim World League (MWL). According to the U.S. Treasury the MWL's Peshawar office was led by Wael Jalaidan, "one of the founders of al Qaeda." Moreover, the main arm of the MWL is the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). The Egyptian magazine, Rose al-Youssef, describes the IIRO as "firmly entrenched with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization." In March 2002 the U.S. headquarters representing both organizations was raided and closed by federal authorities. One of the officers of the closed branch in Herndon, Virginia, was al-Obaid. The Wall Street Journal describes him as "an official enmeshed in a terror financing controversy."

Thinly Veiled Totalitarianism
Wahhabi ideology is also totalitarian to a unique degree in its repression of women. In 2002 the world press carried stories of an extreme example: Religious police in Saudi Arabia forced some young girls fleeing a burning school back inside to their deaths because they were not properly veiled. This is a fanaticism that knows no bounds.

Words and beliefs have consequences, and totalitarians are often remarkably clear about what they will do once they have enough power. Many brushed aside Mein Kampf when it was first written but it turned out to be an excellent guide to the Nazis' behavior once they had the power to implement it. We ignore the Wahhabis' teaching of Salafist fanaticism at our peril.

The Struggle for Islam
There are two important points we must understand in dealing with this ideology and its teachings.

First of all, the rest of us — Christians, Jews, other Muslims, followers of other religions, non-believers — are under absolutely no obligation to accept the Wahhabis' and their apologists' claims that they represent "true Islam." This is equivalent to the claims of Torquemada in the 16th century to represent "true Christianity." He tortured and persecuted Jews, Muslims, and dissident Christians, burned many at the stake, and stole their property. We are under no obligation to take Torquemada's word that he represented "true Christianity" and would be under no obligation to take the word of any successor should one arise. By the same token, we are under no obligation to accept the Wahhabis' claim to represent the great and just religion of Islam.

Second, it is difficult for Americans to bring themselves to draw distinctions among those who claim they are following the requirements of their religion — we generally do not want to quarrel with others' religious beliefs even if they seem very strange to us. But we must realize that murderous totalitarianism that claims religious sanction is different. We have defeated four major totalitarian movements in the last six and a half decades: German Nazism, Italian Fascism, Japanese Imperialism, and Soviet Communism. Only Japanese Imperialism had a major religious element. Communism however was secular, so our current generation of leaders has little experience with a totalitarian ideology that seeks to hide behind one of the world's great religions the way Torquemada cloaked his murderousness in claims to represent Christianity. This makes it difficult for most Americans to understand IslamoNazism. We tend to regard each person's religious beliefs as a private matter. But we must learn to make an exception for theocratic totalitarianism masquerading as religion.

During the Cold War we had little difficulty in distinguishing between, say, the Khmer Rouge and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, although both called themselves "Socialists." But it is harder for us to bring ourselves to distinguish between those who follow the Wahhabi party line on the one hand and, on the other, brave and decent individuals such the American Sufi leader Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, who has been warning Americans of the danger of Islamist terror since well before 9/11. We must get over this reluctance to challenge the perpetrators of and apologists for theocratic totalitarianism.

Cold War Lessons
Does taking on Wahhabism and its supporters mean that we must stand opposed to all cooperation with the government of Saudi Arabia, or attempt to change the Saudi regime in short order? No. The needs of statecraft must also be considered. We fought the Communist ideology in different ways from 1917 through the Cold War. But while we were fighting it, for nearly four years during World War II we were close allies of the Soviets, because we needed them with us against Hitler. Over the years we had commercial relations with them (they bought our wheat and Pepsis, we bought their oil) and some of us spent years negotiating arms-control agreements with them, sometimes to positive effect. In short, we worked as the need arose over the years with the Soviet state, but we generally kept up our ideological struggle against Communism, especially after 1947.

We need to keep this history in mind when dealing with the government of Saudi Arabia. The royal family has some reformers in it, including, to a mild degree, King Abdullah, with whom we may make some common cause. We need to work with the Saudi government on reform and, of course, on issues related to oil. But just as we took steps in the 1980s to try to limit Europe's dependence on Soviet natural-gas supplies we would be well advised today to reduce our own oil dependency. And we must never forget the underlying totalitarian ideology of the Saudi state.

How might we undertake to fight this Wahhabi ideology? Again, we should recall some Cold War lessons. By the 1950s, after a congressional attempt to outlaw Communism was struck down by the Supreme Court, and after Joseph McCarthy's attempt to spread guilt by association was defeated, we hit upon several ways to deal with our domestic Communists. We made them register. We infiltrated them with large numbers of FBI agents. We essentially made their lives miserable. It was legal for them and their front groups to exist — indeed they perennially ran Gus Hall for President — and they even recruited some spies for the Soviets. But despite their best efforts they were not a serious force in American life, nor did they succeed in undermining our ability to fight the Cold War. At the same time we made common cause with Democratic socialists around the world, just as we must make common cause today with the hundreds of millions of decent Muslims with whom we have no quarrel.

We should have a frank national discussion about how we may learn from this history and deal with Sunni theocratic totalitarianism — so that we may help it join its secular cousins, Nazism and Communism (and its predecessor totalitarian religious movements such as Torquemada's Inquisition) where they all rightly belong: on the ash-heap of history.

— R. James Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence.

Bush says Iran a 'real threat'

Reuters
Wed Dec 14, 2005

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush on Wednesday called Iran a "real threat" and lashed out at President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the country's nuclear program and calls for the destruction of Israel.

"Iran's a real threat," Bush told Fox News in an interview in which he repeated his charge that Iran was part of an "axis of evil" along with North Korea and prewar Iraq. "I called it part of the 'axis of evil' for a reason," Bush said.

"I'm concerned about a theocracy that has got little transparency, a country whose president has declared the destruction of Israel as part of their foreign policy, and a country that will not listen to the demands of the free world to get rid of its ambitions to have a nuclear weapon," Bush said in the interview.

Ahmadinejad, a former Revolutionary Guardsman who was elected president in June, said Israel must be "wiped off the map" in October, provoking a diplomatic storm and stoking fears about Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Earlier on Wednesday, Ahmadinejad triggered another wave of international condemnation when he declared the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, a myth.

Washington accuses Tehran of seeking nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is only for generating electricity.

In dealing with Iran, Bush said he continued "to work the diplomatic front," but that his objective was to "end tyranny."

To Iran's leaders, Bush said, "I would hope they'd be wise enough to begin to listen to the people and allow the people to participate in their government."

After the Elections

By Zalmay Khalilzad
Thursday, December 15, 2005; A33

Today is a historic day for Iraq. Iraqis of all sects and ethnic groups will participate in elections. Most significantly, the Sunni Arab community will participate in large numbers. More than 1,000 Sunni clerics have called on their followers to vote. A number of Sunni Arab political groups that boycotted the January elections are fielding candidates. Sunni Arab leaders have called on insurgents to cease their attacks, and some insurgent groups have said they will comply.

Today's elections will create a National Assembly that is far more representative than the current one. This in turn can help accelerate progress toward success in Iraq. Success will depend on improvements in establishing a broad-based and effective government; building stronger Iraqi security forces, and gaining the confidence of all Iraqi communities in their security institutions; winning over insurgents to the political process; increasing the capacity of the national and local government; instituting economic reforms and promoting private-sector development; and gaining more support from neighboring states for stabilizing Iraq.

Broad-based government. Before today, the priority was to engage the Sunni Arab community -- including the rejectionists -- and get it to buy into the political process. Now the focus shifts to forming a moderate, cross-ethnic, cross-sectarian coalition that can govern the country effectively. Many Iraqi political leaders have expressed a wish to form or participate in such a coalition. It will be important that the head of security ministries be trusted by all communities and not come from elements of the population that have militias. Equally important is that key ministers be selected not just for political considerations but also for competence. And the next government must put more emphasis on human rights.

We will work with the new ministers and implement a program of support to increase the capacity of key ministries. The new constitution delegates much authority to the provinces. To assist in this transition and improve the capacity of local governments, we are building up our presence in the provinces to work with local institutions. The goal here, as with the security sector, is to promote self-reliance.

To bring Iraqis together and consolidate their participation in the political process, the next National Assembly will have the opportunity to amend the constitution, with the goal of broadening support for the document and turning it into a national compact. The assembly also must review how de-Baathification has been carried out so far and outline a way forward that balances the requirements of justice with those of reconciliation.

These steps will create the needed conditions to achieve our goal of inducing Iraqi rejectionists and insurgents to abandon violence -- and thus isolate Saddamists and terrorists. Together with the next government, we will continue to expand our engagement with the Sunnis' leaders.

Confidence in security institutions. A key challenge facing Iraq is the need for greater confidence in the security institutions. Besides training Iraqi forces, the next government must continue to increase the credibility of those forces within Iraqi communities. This will require balanced representation of all communities in the security forces, an end to the kind of abuses that have recently been discovered in facilities operated by the Interior Ministry, and competent and widely trusted ministers heading security institutions.

Continued pressure on the terrorists who promote a civil war will also be required. Together with the Iraqis, we will conduct focused operations that will clear areas of terrorists; deploy capable Iraqi forces to hold them against enemy re-infiltration; and build up the local capacity for governance, reconstruction and economic development. We will need to provide logistics, intelligence and quick-reaction forces in support. In the coming year Iraqis will assume much more of the burden of action on the front lines and do so more effectively.

Economic opportunity. The United States will work with the new Iraqi government to better stimulate private-sector economic development in areas such as agriculture and to reduce subsidies -- with the ultimate goal of eliminating them while also creating a safety net for the least fortunate. As economic opportunity grows, the ranks of the unemployed -- some of whom engage in terrorism just to earn money to feed their families -- will start to contract. We will engage provincial and local authorities, who have the best sense of community needs, in designing and implementing development programs to further isolate extremists and promote job creation and improvement of essential services. We will encourage the new government to better engage regional states and others in Iraqi reconstruction and debt-forgiveness programs.

Enhanced diplomacy. Together with the new government, we will need to intensify diplomatic efforts to mobilize support for Iraq in the region and around the world. As part of the outreach campaign to Sunni Arabs in Iraq, the United States is taking advantage of advice and contacts from friends in Arab states and Turkey. The United States is also encouraging its friends to increase their contacts and economic ties with Iraq. This will have to intensify.

In addition, the United States and the new Iraqi government will need to put continued and, if necessary, increased pressure on Syria to prevent Saddamists and terrorists from operating on its territory.

Our strategy in Iraq is putting us on a path toward success, though many challenges lie ahead and much hard work remains to be done by Americans and Iraqis alike. But the benefits of success are worth the effort. Success in Iraq will advance American interests and values. It is a linchpin in the needed transformation of the broader Middle East, which is the defining challenge of our time.

The writer is the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Ex-Guantanamo Detainees Trends

By Deroy Murdock
Washington Times
December 15, 2005

Now that President Bush finally has returned the unrelenting fire of his critics on Iraq, he should use hard-hitting speeches and White House white papers to address liberal bellyaching about Guantanamo.

Beyond reminding his opponents that the Gitmo boys are there for brutality they committed before they arrived, the president should explain to friends and foes at home and abroad that detainees released from Guantanamo do not always go quietly into the night.

The Pentagon knows of roughly a dozen former Gitmo detainees who did not return to the peaceful Koranic reflection from which their leftist defenders seem to believe they were sidelined. At least for some ex-Guantanamites, U.S. military custody was a mere vacation from their violence.

In late 2001, U.S. troops in Afghanistan caught Rasul Kudayev, an associate of the al Qaeda-tied Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and sent him to Guantanamo. On Feb. 28, 2004, Kudayev and six other Russian detainees were handed to the Kremlin, which freed them that June. Kudayev made headlines last month when Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel accused him of supporting an attack in Nalchik, capitol of the North Caucasus' Kabardino-Balkariya region.

"First of all, there is his own confession and the testimony of five witnesses, who said he led the military group that assaulted the Interior Ministry's health facility and the presidential cottage," Shepel told Novosti news.

Kudayev claims innocence in the Oct. 13 attack, which killed at least 91 Islamic terrorists along with 35 law-enforcement officers and 12 innocent civilians.

Abdullah Mehsud returned to Pakistan in March 2004 after about two years at Guantanamo. Officials believe he leads an al Qaeda-linked group that kidnapped two Chinese engineers in October 2004. Terrorists strapped explosives to the chests of these hostages who were building a dam in disorderly South Waziristan. Pakistani commandoes freed Wang Ende, although Wang Peng died in the crossfire, along with all five abductors.

Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar was a top Taliban commander who was caught after Afghanistan's liberation. According to Interior Minister Ali Jalali, Ghaffar spent about eight months at Guantanamo before his release and repatriation to Afghanistan in the summer of 2002. After learning that he planned to attack police, Afghan forces killed Ghaffar and two of his terrorist colleagues in Uruzgan province on Sept. 25, 2004. According to its governor, Jan Mohammad Khan, Ghaffar also attacked U.S. Special Forces troops and a Helmand district chief, killing three Afghan soldiers.

"The process of assessing detainees is difficult and involves a certain degree of risk," says Pentagon spokesman Commander Flex Plexico. "Many detainees later identified as having returned to their terrorist activities falsely claimed to be farmers, truck drivers, cooks, small-scale merchants, or low-level combatants."

The Pentagon says that after leaving Guantanamo, former enemy combatants killed an Afghan judge as he departed a mosque. Others have shot at U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, while even more have been killed in action there.

Some former Gitmoites have not fired their weapons again, but sound eager to do so.

"If I get a chance to fight jihad again, I will definitely go," Khalil-ur Rahman told the Associated Press. "I will not miss it." Rahman was sent from Guantanamo to Pakistan in fall 2004 and completely freed last June.

On the Danish government's request, Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane was released from Guantanamo in February 2004, two years after arriving from a Pakistani terror camp. Since then, this not-so-great Dane has dismissed as "toilet paper" the no-more-terrorism contract he signed with Gitmo officials before departure.

As Henrik Bering reported in the Oct. 18, 2004, Weekly Standard, Abderrahmane said: "I identify myself as a Muslim, and I will shoot anybody who fights against the cause of Allah on the battlefield."

To be fair, 180 detainees have been released from Guantanamo, and 76 more have been transferred to foreign countries. Most seem to have avoided trouble. Whether they have foresworn terrorism or simply evaded scrutiny is anybody's guess. But Bushophobes should understand that America remains at war, and the boys of Guantanamo fought in this conflict. Releasing them before victory makes as much sense as freeing captured Nazis in 1944. Nobody knows how much destruction one, five, 12, or more terrorists can commit once unsupervised.

Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, Va.

Asian Leaders Establish New Group

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 15, 2005; A25

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec. 14 -- Asian leaders agreed Wednesday to create a new, loosely united regional grouping, including India and Australia, to work together on combating Asia's economic, security and political problems.

The 16-nation association, which will hold annual summit conferences, significantly widened the circle of cooperation among countries represented by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and a sister group, ASEAN Plus Three -- China, Japan and South Korea.

The formation of the new group, decided at the first East Asian Summit, marked an attempt to respond to a conviction among Asian leaders that their region requires a stronger independent voice in world affairs and a new forum without the leading role the United States has played since World War II.

"We have established the East Asia Summit as a forum for dialogue on broad strategic, political and economic issues of common interest and concern with the aim of promoting peace, stability and economic prosperity in East Asia," a communique said.

"This is something that is accepted by us all," added Malaysia's prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who hosted the summit in Kuala Lumpur in tandem with ASEAN's regular annual meetings.

But by accepting Australia, New Zealand and India into the new group, the leaders left unanswered questions about what goals it would pursue, how unified it would try to become and how it would relate to the long-standing ASEAN and ASEAN Plus Three groupings. A team of senior Asian officials was assigned to weigh these issues and bring proposals to the next East Asia Summit, scheduled for a year from now in the Philippines, Abdullah said.

One question they will have to address is Russia's desire to participate, raised by President Vladimir Putin in an appearance as an observer here and an address to the gathered Asian leaders. The United States, which participates in other Asian-Pacific groupings, was not invited to the inaugural summit and did not participate even as an observer.

U.S. diplomats earlier had expressed concern about being left out, pointing out long-standing U.S. interests in the region and the U.S. military's dominant role in Asian security. But as the group was broadened to include Australia, India and New Zealand, it became clear there was plenty of weight to balance off Chinese influence and, particularly through Australia, a ready channel for U.S. concerns.

Underlying the ambiguity about the new group's role and degrees of membership was concern over evolving power relationships as China becomes stronger and increasingly willing -- even eager -- to exercise regional leadership and Japan moves strategically closer to the United States.

China and Japan also have been divided by increasingly tense differences over Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's regular visits to a shrine honoring Japan's war dead and rival claims to oil deposits and several small islands in the East China Sea. Those differences were evident in Kuala Lumpur, where Premier Wen Jiabao refused to sit down with Koizumi for a regular China-Japan-South Korea meeting.

Seeking to soften the atmosphere, Koizumi leaned over during a signing ceremony Wednesday to ask Wen to lend him a pen. When the Chinese premier smiled and handed it over, assembled diplomats applauded.

Aside from the politesse, however, Japan joined Indonesia and Singapore in leading the fight to include India, Australia and New Zealand in the new grouping, diplomats said.

As originally conceived by Malaysia and pushed by China, the new summit group was to include only the 10 ASEAN countries along with China, Japan and South Korea. That would have made it a vessel for Chinese diplomatic leadership in a forum distinct from other groups -- such as the ASEAN Regional Forum or the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum -- that also include the United States.

Bush Names Rice To Head Nation Rebuilding

Glenn Kessler
Washington Post
December 15, 2005

President Bush formally designated Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to lead efforts to rebuild and stabilize nations suffering from war or civil strife, the White House said yesterday.

The announcement of the new presidential directive -- under discussions for months -- is the closest the administration has come to acknowledging that it bungled the planning for postwar Iraq when Bush gave the Pentagon authority for stabilization.

Before the 2003 invasion, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his aides largely ignored postwar planning by the State Department, nixed key State officials from going to Iraq and tried to create from scratch an organization to run the country. If the directive had been in place at the time Bush contemplated the invasion, the State Department would have been in charge, officials said yesterday.

Under pressure from Congress, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in 2004 created an office to coordinate reconstruction, but until now it did not have government-wide authority. Carlos Pascual, who headed the 55-person office, is leaving to join the Brookings Institution; Rice is interviewing possible successors.

Under the directive, the secretary of state will prepare agencies for postwar work, coordinate with the Pentagon during military operations and seek to identify states that are failing.

After poor coordination among agencies in Bosnia, President Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 56 in 1997 to ensure better coordination in post-conflict emergencies. The PDD resulted in better coordination between military and civilian efforts after the war in Kosovo but was largely ignored by the Bush administration.

In Four Speeches, Two Answers on War's End

As Bush Tries to Recast Debate, Definitions of Victory and Iraqi Security Diverge
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 15, 2005; A01

As President Bush wrapped up a series of speeches on the war yesterday, he once again gave a clear answer to when U.S. troops would come home from Iraq: "We will not leave until victory has been achieved."

And he also gave this clear answer to when U.S. troops would come home from Iraq: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

What he did not do was reconcile those two ideas. Will U.S. soldiers withdraw from Iraq only after the insurgency has been vanquished? Or will they withdraw when Iraqi security forces become adequately trained to take over the battle themselves? Or somewhere in between?

For Bush, the four speeches delivered over the past two weeks represented a determined effort to reshape the angry debate at home over the war, presenting a more sober picture of the situation while highlighting the progress he sees exemplified in today's election of a new, full-fledged Iraqi parliament. At the same time, according to analysts, he carefully calibrated his rhetoric to give him maximum flexibility in determining ultimately just what will constitute victory.

The vow to "settle for nothing less than complete victory" satisfies Bush's desire to project Churchillian resolve, a strategy in keeping with White House theory that public support for a war depends on whether Americans believe they will win. The "stand up, stand down" formulation, by contrast, is intended to signal that the United States will not remain forever enmeshed in a bloody overseas conflict fueled by sectarian enmity.

The twin messages stem from a conclusion by White House advisers that they needed to counter the growing calls to begin pulling out of Iraq, or at least set a timetable for doing so. As Bush has noted, war against an amorphous enemy does not end in a surrender "on the deck of the USS Missouri," as with Japan in 1945. And so deciding the terms of victory becomes as much a political equation as a military one.

"Victory will be achieved," he said yesterday, "by meeting certain clear objectives -- when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can protect their own people, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot attacks against our country."

The 35-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" released as Bush began his speaking tour outlined three tracks to victory: political, security and economic. On the security track, the document stated that the objective is "to develop the Iraqis' capacity" to wage a campaign "to defeat the terrorists and neutralize the insurgency" -- suggesting separate standards of victory against foreign Islamic radicals and homegrown Iraqi insurgents, without defining the difference between "defeat" and "neutralize."

"If I were in his shoes, I would be trying to do the same," said Mara Rudman, a deputy national security adviser under President Bill Clinton and now a Middle East scholar at the Center for American Progress. "He is struggling to make sure this is defined as a win whenever he gets out, so he's trying to keep the definition of victory to be something he can meet."

The strategic ambiguity also reflects hard experience inside a White House that has repeatedly miscalculated Iraqi resistance to the United States. After predictions that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" aircraft-carrier speech and Vice President Cheney's assertion in June that the insurgency was in its "last throes," Bush advisers have learned to stay away from forecasting imminent victory.

"Having been burned with estimates before . . . we are being very, very careful not to give specific month or even year horizons that we could be stuck with," said a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record. "It's not as if we have a secret ersatz timetable and we just won't say what it is."

Asked about the distinction between complete victory and standing down as Iraqis stand up, the official acknowledged, "It's been a confusing concept." Reality may seem more muddled than rhetoric. Even as Iraqi security forces take the lead in battling insurgents, he said, the United States will still need to provide tactical air support and other help.

Bush is not the only one trying not to be pinned down. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) has urged his party against laying down particular proposals on Iraq. Instead, he sent a letter to Bush yesterday signed by 41 Senate Democrats calling on the president to make 2006 "a period of significant transition" leading to troop withdrawals without giving specifics.

The liberal antiwar group MoveOn.org harbors no such reticence. The group said its members handed "Out in '06" petitions bearing 400,000 signatures to the district offices of 244 members of Congress yesterday calling for an exit plan to leave Iraq entirely by the end of next year.

As part of its new communications strategy, the White House has tried to impose new terminology to cast those resisting U.S. forces in a more sinister light. After Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he no longer liked the word "insurgents," the word was struck from Bush speeches. And the president has begun using "Saddamists" to refer to supporters of ousted president Saddam Hussein, a word he that used only once in public until two weeks ago but now appears in every speech.

Bush's speaking tour over the past two weeks has also attempted to reposition the president as more realistic about the war. Even as he maintained that victory, however it is defined, is inevitable, he acknowledged setbacks in detail, often agreeing with critics about points where the effort has gone wrong.

In yesterday's speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he conceded that he went to war with mistaken assumptions about Iraq's weapons programs. "It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," he said. "As president, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq." But he added, "Given Saddam's history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision."

The less rosy language has won plaudits from skeptical analysts and politicians. "There was a sense the president was on another planet," said Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "What the president has done in the last week or so is be much more frank about challenges without diluting his optimism. . . . It puts him back in the debate."